The Alienist - Caleb Carr [45]
“Of course they’re trying to trap us, woman!” I said, breathing hard. “You and your detective games, we’re going to get beaten to death! Cyrus!” I cupped my hands and bellowed at the front door as the men began to move our way. “Cyrus!” I let my hands fall, despondent. “Where in hell is the man?”
Sara only clutched her bag tightly without a word; and when the two thugs in the bowlers appeared at the rear end of the hall, apparently sealing our fates, she reached into it. “Don’t worry, John,” she said confidently. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” And with that she withdrew a .45-caliber Army Model Colt revolver, with a four-and-a-half-inch barrel and pearl grips. Sara was what you might call a firearms enthusiast; but I was not reassured.
“Oh, my God,” I said, ever more alarmed. “Sara, you can’t just blast away in a dark hallway, you don’t know what you’ll hit—”
“Can you suggest a better idea?” she said, looking around, realizing that I was right and feeling alarm for the first time.
“Well, I—”
But it was too late: the men from the stoop were upon us in a screaming rush. I grabbed Sara and covered her with my body, hoping she wouldn’t shoot me in the gut during the ensuing attack.
You can imagine my shock when that attack failed to materialize. We were momentarily buffeted by the men with sticks, but that was only as they passed. Still screaming, they fell on the two thugs behind us with rare ferocity. Given the odds, it wasn’t much of a contest: we heard a few seconds of shouting, grunting, and wrestling, and then the hall was filled with heavy breathing and a few moans. Sara and I got out onto the stoop and then raced to the calash, where Cyrus stood waiting.
“Cyrus!” I said. “Are you aware that we could’ve been killed in there?”
“It didn’t seem very likely, Mr. Moore,” he answered calmly. “Not given what those men were saying before they went it.”
“And what was that, pray tell?” I asked, still not satisfied with his attitude.
Before he could answer the bodies of the two thugs came flying out the door of the tenement, hitting the snowy pavement hard. Their bowlers followed. The men were unconscious, and in a general condition that made Mr. Santorelli look a picture of health. Our friends with the sticks followed triumphantly, even though a few of them had taken some hard knocks, too. The one who’d spoken to me earlier looked over at us, producing huge frosty clouds as he breathed hard.
“I may hate coons,” he said with a grin. “But, damnation, I do hate cops more!”
“That,” Cyrus murmured, “was what they were saying.”
I looked at the thugs on the ground. “Cops?” I said to the man by the stoop.
“Ex-cops,” he answered, walking toward me. “Used to be roundsmen in this neighborhood. They’ve got a hell of a nerve, coming back to a building like this.” I nodded, looking at the unconscious bodies on the sidewalk before me, and then signaled thanks to the man. “Your honor,” he said, indicating his mouth, “that was thirsty work.” I pulled out some coins and threw them to him. He tried but failed to catch the money, at which his mates fell grabbing to the ground. They were soon at each other’s throats. Sara and I got into the calash, and in a few minutes Cyrus had us on Broadway, heading uptown.
Sara was full of good cheer, now that we were safe, and she fairly leapt around the carriage, recalling each dangerous moment of our expedition rapturously. I smiled and nodded, glad that she’d been able to have a moment of positive action; but my mind was on something else. I was going over what Mrs. Santorelli had said, and trying to examine it as Kreizler would have. There was something in the tale of young Giorgio that reminded me of Laszlo’s account of the children in the water tower; something very important, though I couldn’t quite put my finger—and then I had it. The behavior. Kreizler had described two troublesome children, embarrassments to their family—and I had just been told about another such youth. All three, in Kreizler’s hypothesis, had met their ends at the hands of the same